I have been fielding a lot of questions about SSD drives. These are drives that have no moving parts. For those who don’t know moving parts are the number one reason regular hard drives fail. Over time those parts break down and that causes the drive to die. These new drives have no moving parts at all. Which means, less heat, less noise and less change of breakdown (in theory). Yes, you caught the last part. I have been doing a lot of research on these drives. I’m mainly focusing on the SATA SSDs though there are other flavors. They come in: PATA, SATA, SATAII, SATAIII, USB2.0, eSATA, USB3.0, PCIExpress, Mini PCIe. Yes, these drives can be connected a multitude of ways. The most common is the SATA interface. Standard SATA, II or III. Mainly depend on your motherboard. In my research I am finding a lot of these drives are still too new to know how long they are going to last. A lot of the drive manufacturers give life in hours, for example: The OCZ 64GB drive has a life rating of 1,500,000 hours. Yes, that’s One MILLION plus hours. Doesn’t take a scientist to see that drive should never die in your life time eh? As a year has under 10,000 hours. To good to be true? I’d say so. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t be hearing from tech friends and reading customer reviews of drives that have died. There does seem to be a pattern though. I see a lot of drives that are going to die do so fairly quickly in the first months. This may mean that drives are getting out that have flaws in them. I have not heard of a drive dying yet that has been in service over a year. I will keep track of this as this is the next great frontier for computers.
SSD drives are for performance. Gamers, Database crunchers, people who have a LOT of programmers running at one time. They are extremely fast, but there is a price. SIZE and COST. They are much smaller than regular drives and they cost a LOT more. Now, you can combine the best of both worlds to fit your budget. You could use a SSD drive for you Operating System and core programs and use a standard drive to store pictures, music, and data. This is much more cost-effective and still allows you to get the speed increase you have been wanting. I have seen systems with SSD drives load up from power on to windows 7 ready to go in 15 seconds. Yes, and that is just the start: Faster boot times and MUCH faster load times on software on the SSD. But, since they are still fairly new I recommend you have an Online Backup Solution before you make this switch. When you factor in that a year of Internet storage for your data is around $60.00 you NEED to make that investment. Time will tell if these drives are as long-lasting as they claim. Do not find out that hard way.
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